I Just Can’t Believe It’s December Links

* Over the weekend, of course, we celebrated the first Star Wars Trailer Day in a decade. Your shot-for-shot dissection. A deeper look. Digging deeper still. The George Lucas Special Edition. Elsewhere on the Star Wars beat: Physicist Proves That R2D2 Is Lighter Than Styrofoam.

* English and foreign language jobs are down nearly 10% again, down almost 40% since 2007.

* New NEH Grants Will Promote Popular Scholarly Books.

* Call for Papers: Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labor.

* Why colleges haven’t stopped binge drinking.

* Donors getting bold in Illinois: U. of Illinois Could Lose Big Gift by Rehiring Adjunct.

* A long, interesting piece on an anti-bullying measure passed by Madison faculty.

* When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths. Black Friday, Or the Circulation of Commodities.

* In not one of those cases did a coal mine owner face criminal charges for the loss of life. That history ended in November, with the indictment of Donald L. Blankenship, the chief executive whose company owned the Upper Big Branch mine near here, where an explosion of methane gas in 2010 spread like a fireball through more than two miles of tunnels, feeding on illegally high levels of coal dust.

* Afrofuturism: The Sonic Companion.

* Putting The Sidekick In The Suit: Black Captain America, Female Thor, And The Illusion Of Progress.

* Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question.

* But where does it come from? My new answer: nobody builds a megadungeon. Megadungeons build themselves. They are the guilty conscience of rulership; the truth commission against power. Great power corrupts, and absolute power does what we’ve been told. Even those who want to rule well feel the attraction of expedient murder and petulant torture, the convenience of imprisoning one’s enemies without trial, buying off the priesthood and covering it all in a glaze of ceremony and pretty words. On this world, this eventually provokes its own reaction. Beneath the seats of power – castle; trading house; senate building – the accumulated sins happening above begin to literally undo the foundations. Dungeons grow. It might not be so tidy as: 60 starved prisoners in the last few decades means 60 skeletons, with hallways for them to roam through; 20 goblins and some rooms for them to squat in appear as a direct result of last year’s punitive expedition against the recalcitrant border villages; one ghoul for each speech in which you cloak your appetites in the honeyed words of dead philosophers, etc.

* How many people are locked up in the United States?

* Officers Who Shot 12-Year-Old Holding Toy Gun Refused To Give Him First Aid. The video that caught the cops lying about Tamir Rice. White Cops File Suit, Claim They Are Punished Too Much For Shooting People.

* Grand Jury Won’t Indict Officers In Ohio Wal-Mart Shooting, Either.

* Missouri almost out of money to attack Ferguson with. St. Louis police officers’ group demands Rams players be disciplined for ‘hands up, don’t shoot. Ferguson: Message from the Grassroots. No healing.

* Why Every Struggle Is Now a Struggle Against the Police.

* Similar cases yield very different results in Wisconsin prison system.

* Georgia’s Top Court Reins In Private Probation Firms For Illegally Extending Sentences. Reined in! The arc of history is long, but!

* Full Nihilism: “Six Reasons I’m Thankful for a Republican Congress.” Two of the six were “I’m bored.” Media professionals!

* One of the worst “errors” of the Obama presidency was the pivot to deficit reduction, when literally no one cares about deficit reduction.

* Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. Amway Journalism.

* Abolish the Senate.

* Officials with a Northern California school district expelled a live-in nanny’s 9-year-old daughter after hiring a private investigator to ascertain where she lived, the Contra Costa Times reported. Having been caught, the school district has now reversed itself.

* Life after people: Someone Flew a Drone Through Chernobyl and the Result Is Haunting.

* Science proves people who still read fiction really are just better.

* How Often Do “Disruptive” Business Practices Actually Mean “Illegal” Business Practices? The Uberiest thing Uber’s done yet.

* Philanthropic Poverty: Bono and other philanthropic capitalists push charity to defend property.

* When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.

* The Super Mario 64 Goomba Nobody Has Ever Killed. The Coin That Took 18 Years to Collect.

* The real roots of midlife crisis, or, the second decade of this blog is going to be a shame. At least we have Charlie Stross’s thought experiments to comfort us.

* How Not to Get Away with Murder.

* My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK.

* An Open Letter to the Administration of Vassar College.

* This TNR piece on the Rolling Stone UVA exposé actually raises some relevant journalism questions, but my sense is this happens entirely by accident in the course of a kneejerk attempt to discredit the story.

* The false rape accusation as witchcraft.

. CTRL-F revenue, CTRL-F income, CTRL-F profit: Vox Media Valued at Nearly $400 Million After Investment.

* The 22-year-old appeared to have killed himself, police said. A handgun was found near his body inside the dumpster. The text he sent said he was sorry, “if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all f—ed up.”

* Even a single season of high school football might have harmful impacts on the brain.

* Your panel-by-panel breakdown of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Watchmen pastiche Pax Americana #1, this year’s instant-classic comic book.

* You don’t have to beg, borrow, or steal anymore: Black Mirror is finally on Netflix.

* Wanderers. Time Trap. Five Minutes.

* And finally, we get to the meat: Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him.

 

Thursday Night Links

* 2016! Bernie’s threatening to run. As always, you should take every drop of energy you’d put into a quixotic 3rd-party run for president and put it towards a new Constitution instead.

* Have Kids, Ruin Your Career, Ask Me How.

* Why Frank Underwood hates children.

* Duke Energy Must Immediately Stop Polluting Groundwater In North Carolina, Judge Rules. The arc of history is long but oops everything is already polluted, bye.

* Huge Coal Company To Pay Largest-Ever Fine After 6,000 Clean Water Violations In 7 Years. In terms of the company’s valuation and the damage done the fine might as well have been $1.

* As Mary Sue Coleman, the university’s president, called for increased enrollment of students “paying the full freight,” enrollment from outside Michigan reached 46 percent last fall. The result is that the university not only reflects the race and class inequities inherent in our society, it actually reinforces and aggravates them.

* After three years in which private college and university administrators led their public counterparts in salary gains, the publics are on top in 2013-14. I can’t wait for next year!

* Let Them Eat Dignity.

* Psychiatry, all along, knew that the evidence wasn’t really there to support the chemical imbalance notion, that it was a hypothesis that hadn’t panned out, and yet psychiatry failed to inform the public of that crucial fact.

* Do white men abuse their colleagues when they let their students call them by their first name?

* I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests.

* And the headline reads: “Your porn is not Canadian enough, CRTC warns erotica channels.” I wrote a little one-act.

“Sorry.” “Sorry.” [off-camera] “Sorry.” #canadianporn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2014

Sorry.

Midday Tuesday

* Something light: The 10 Most Insane Jimmy Olsen Moments of All Time.

* Something dark: Checking in with the victims of the Stanford Prison Experiment, 40 years on.

* Lawyers for the coal industry have argued that it’s not their fault birth defects are linked to mountaintop-removal coal-mining; those people are just inbred.

* And Kevin Drum on how to understand Obama:

Just do this: whenever you think Obama has done something dumb or weakminded or inexplicable, remind yourself that he doesn’t necessarily have the same goals as you. He sincerely wants a deal that involves concessions from both sides, and once you understand that his actions will suddenly seem a lot less dumb, weakminded, and inexplicable. In fact, they’ll seem pretty obvious.

I’ve been here quite a while.

* Yglesias has an interesting post that flirts with putting a good, 11-dimensional-chess face on Obama’s debt-ceiling strategy:

We’re looking at an administration strategy to get a bipartisan deal over long-term fiscal balance. It’s a strategy whose purpose is to try to change the dynamic in which we alternate between Democrats-only balanced deficit reduction bills (like the 1993 Clinton budget) and GOP-led deficit increasing bills (like the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts). It’s the debt ceiling that’s a means to an end. And you can see that the key Democratic bargaining position here is to insist on revenue increases rather than to try to minimize spending cuts.

This is, certainly, a bold strategy. Rather than fighting the GOP’s effort to create a debt ceiling hostage crisis, Obama called their bluff. He’s willing to do huge amounts of deficit reduction, including giant spending cuts, but he’s not willing to resolve the crisis without some tax hikes. The victim has become the hostage taker. In an instrumental sense, it’s inspired, and of course has created the circumstances under which it might be possible for the administration to sell congressional Democrats on cuts they would otherwise never accept.

before rapidly turning out-and-out apocalyptic:

But on the merits, saying we can only raise the debt ceiling if we do several trillions of dollars worth of balanced austerity is only somewhat more reasonable than saying we can only raise the debt ceiling if we do several trillions of dollars worth of spending-only austerity. The world is currently grappling with a number of severe economic problems. There is, among other things, a continued “flight to quality” effect in which people want safe assets, and it’s concurrent with serious sovereign debt issues in southern europe. The fact that there’s apparently a bipartisan consensus in the United States that we ought to deliberately engineer a sovereign debt crisis right now as part of tactical bargaining over Medicare is pretty scary.

* On the bright side, even Eric Cantor can’t get his numbers to add up—so maybe it is all just for show…

Burning Down the House

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., calls Massey Energy a “criminal enterprise” in this must-watch interview on last night’s Colbert Report.

You Idiots!

‘The Climate Killers: Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming.’

‘As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming.’

Via Climate Progress, which has some additional commentary.

V-Coal

The Environmental Appeals Board effectively killed the expansion of the coal industry yesterday in a landmark ruling requiring the “best-available control technology” for CO2 emissions. I’m on my way out the door, but this is big and very welcome news. More commentary at Climate Progress, Think Progress, Daily Kos, and HuffPo.

Schweitzer

Everybody’s raving about Brian Schweitzer, who managed to get the crowd fired up about energy and about Obama after Warner put them to sleep. (Everybody! Benen, Marshall, Kos, Giordano.)

One of the still-underappreciated stories of this election, I think, is the national hunger for a honest conversation about energy and the environment, something we’ve been entirely denied by coal-industry-sponsored debates in the primaries and Exxon-sponsored convention coverage in the general.

In the cheap seats, stand up!